I agree with both sides of the decision. Governments should not be allowed to ban them from communities through zoning, and these places should be allowed to monitor what their customers are up to in their cafe. From a libertarian perspective, it's a double-win, even if it's only a mixed blessing in the eyes of the tinfoil hat crowd.
Your point leads to the question: Who in the hell would want to buy archives of Car Talk!? Two mechanics who share a goofy sense of humor taking calls about car problems from Audi-driving NPR listeners... What could possibly possess you to want to re-listen to episodes of such a show!?
IMHO the main disadvantage of MP3 here is that it sucks at low bitrates...
"Car talk" is two guys discussing auto maintenence and telling old jokes. I'm sure Click & Clack are flattered to hear that you find their voices to be so pretty that you want to hear them in high fidelity, but most of us could be happy with a 56k MP3 stream.
Here, he does so because it's about to get his ass kicked. Enormous difference.
Watch the movie again, because you missed something. What shocks Faramir is not that the ring caused Borimir's death, but that it corrupted Borimir. The line that convinces him to stay away from the ring is Sam's warning that Borimir attacked Frodo.
Samwise: "He tried to kill him! After swearing an oath to protect him!"
Once he heard that his noble brother had broken his oath over the ring, he realized the extent of its evil, and decided to let the hobbits complete their mission to destroy it, in spite of it being the one thing that could possibly justify him in the eyes of his father.
Now go look up the first publish date and realize that all that was written probably before you were born.
1984 was written in 1948.
Brave New World was written in 1931.
Heinlein was far from the first to use sci-fi as a cautionary tale about the dangers of modern political trends. (The first popular example I can think of is H.G. Wells, with "The Time Machine" in 1895.)
That was one of my complaints when I saw it in the theater. You will be happy to know that in the extended DVD the trees do wake up at Treebeard's call, just in time to go crush the orcs retreating from Helm's Deep into a sticky paste.
The biggest weakness of the novels is that Tolkein doesn't describe the women with nearly as much detail as he describes stuff like furniture and weather.
By mining the Appendices for more Aragorn/Arwen romance (and replacing a lot of the "hi, I'm an elf you never meet before with one line and one task - you will never hear from me again" with more lines for Arwen) they made a movie that actually had a reason for typical women to bother watching it beyond gazing dreamily into Orlando Bloom's CGI-enhanced eyes.
The question I have is this: Is there any change from the book that actually bothers people?
Nobody I've spoken to is even the least bit troubled by the skipping of Tom Bombadil's chapters, the compressing of a couple dozen elf jobs into Arwen's character, the burning of the shire becoming a dream sequence, etc. What few nit-picks I thought I had about TTT turned out to be included in the Special Edition after all. Frankly, I think the majority of the changes were slight improvements, and all very faithful to the spirit of the work.
So, is there anybody out there that can name a change or two that they actually considered a major let-down?
Makes sense. Starship Troopers was a largely forgotten novel as far as most people were concerned until the movie came out and provoked teaming throngs of nerds to loudly complain that they were pissing on a classic work, prompting people to want to see what all the fuss was about. The backlash against the movie probably created more hype than the book ever enjoyed.
I'd love to know the stats of the people which paid to see the LotR trilogy multiple times, bought the various DVD editions, plastic cups from some fast-food dive but haven't read the books and have no intention of doing so.
Here's your stats:
Total: 0. Margin of error: Not enough to worry about.
People who have not read the books tend to see them each once at the theater, and come out saying "a pretty good action flick, but kinda slow at times."
The psycho-fans who are buying little Gollum statues and set pieces off eBay are people who read The Silmarillion twice (but claim to have read it three times.)
Actually, I believe what I implied was that for HPC, they were better than a hacked X-Box.
Believe whatever you like. What you said was "the same thing," and saying so is completely ignoring the facts.
The modified X-Box is a working stand-alone Linux PC, and clustering a network of them is a matter of software configuration only.
Following your reccomendation, there would still be a crapload of stuff to buy before you could even get started. Power supplies, for example. You can argue that it is worth the extra expense to have something that you can tweak to your specific needs, but don't imply you are getting the same thing for less money, because you're not.
Of course since you clearly know more than me about large scale clusters, you must be right....
Not sure where I said or even implied that. I obviously know more about basic math, though, because I can see that a $79 logic board plus $50 - $100 worth of parts will cost more than $99.
Female molex connector jacks. Right now you have a whole bunch of wires in the anticipation that everyone has a RAID array, 2 cdroms, and video card that needs auxially power. The unused connectors have to be rubberbanded and bunched somewhere.
If you are 100% positive that you will neither use all that stuff, nor re-sell the PC before it's obsolete, a pair of horizontal wire clippers can provide a very simple solution to your problem.:)
Meanwhile somebody over at Ars Technica will brag about how he stepped it up to 412.5W, but needed a jet turbine cooling system to prevent it from melting the bezels on his PC case.
Yea, but I've never once bought a product based on a/. review.
Every time a front-page story about the iPod goes up, you get 150 posts about how much the iRiver is a better deal. Every Rio story has just as many posts trashing it in favor of the iPod.
As far as I can tell, a/. story gets you a 2-12 paragraph blurb followed by 300 posts bashing your product, your company, and anybody who buys your stuff. Not a very good way to advertize at all!
(I have, on the other hand, bought stuff I've seen on/. banner ads. My "#include " beer glasses from thinkgeek, for example.)
You think that an exposed motherboard, cpu, and HD, with no memory, no video board, no networking, no case, and no power source is the "same thing" as a hacked X-Box?
Buck Henry adapted it to be a low-budget TV movie, too. It's not a bad rental, although the jazz performance that Harrison hypes to wake people up is a total let-down. A pedestrian light-jazz saxophone solo as a means to show how special music can be when individual greatness is encouraged just doesn't quite work, but I suppose they couldn't afford an old clip of Parker or Coltrane.
Still, the rest of it is a fun show. (Plus, there's that comfy ironic feeling you get from watching a TV show based on a book about the dumbing-down of America instead of reading the book itself.)
I tend to avoid this problem by using adapters that rely on the dock port whenever possible. Then I can just leave the headphones plugged in.
One bit of advice that might save you some money: get some contact cleaner (that really spendy stuff you get in hi-fi and electronic repair stores.) It is very likely that a thin layer of crud and/or oxydization has developed at the exact point on the headphone jack where it comes in contact with the plug. you might not even see it easilly if it's only big enough to hold the channel barely far enough to prevent a solid connection.
Brush some of that cleaning solvent on the jack contacts (you may need take it apart to do this, but it's obviously out of warranty anyway or you could have this fixed for free), and while you are at it, clean the plugs that you usually use with it.
9 times out of 10 a good cleaning is all that really needs to be done to repair unreliable headphone jacks, noisy volume control knobs, unresponsive VU meters, etc.
I have a strong suspicion I'm being "bitchslapped."
I don't know what that means
A "bitchslap", in the/. moderation sense of the word, is when one or more readers with moderation points dislike something you said or stood for and decided to use all their mod points (you get 5 at a time) to mod down as many of your posts as they can, as a weird sort of vigilante justice.
It never really works, because: 1. If you post reasonable contributions to conversations now and then, you will probably be at or near the old "karma kap", and losing 5 or even 10 points of karma will have little impact on either your bonus mod or how often you are asked to mod & meta-mod. 2. Meta-moderation tends to undo what little damage there is.
Over the years, I've been bitchslapped by people who assumed I was anti-right, anti-left, anti-religion, anti-atheism, anti-Linux, anti-Mac, anti-Windows, and the list goes on, all because I form opinions and express them, and some people can't stand it when somebody arrives at a conclusion different from them. They immediately assume I must be one of those Eeeeevil people on the Other Side of whatever holy struggle they think they are a part of.
Maybe I should create a/. journal page to express where my personal philosophies, so people don't have to make wild guesses on what my biases are.
I suggest that you consider foam (mental vision : put ice cream in a tall glass, pour root beer over it - the foam is the fluffy stuff on top... ) for a second - it isn't a liquid but if you touch it you get wet.
Bad example. Foam is lots of little bubbles. In other words, it's pockets of gas suspended by surface tension within a film of liquid. The gas is not at liquid density. You get wet when you touch it because you break the bubbles, allowing the gas to escape and the liquid to adhere to your skin.
By the logic of your example, snow is neither solid nor liquid, because you can build structures with it but your ass gets wet when your brother drops a snowball down the back of your snowmobile suit.
When the kids of 3 world countries run out into the fields to pick the flowers??
Kind of puts a new twist on the old anti-Goldwater commercial, eh?
Any kid growing up in a country where landmines are a problem is probably very likely to listen to the nice soldiers that say "stay away from flowers that look like this... we grow them on mine fields."
The alternative is to further engineer the flowers to look or smell unpleasant, so kids will leave them alone.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with both sides of the decision. Governments should not be allowed to ban them from communities through zoning, and these places should be allowed to monitor what their customers are up to in their cafe. From a libertarian perspective, it's a double-win, even if it's only a mixed blessing in the eyes of the tinfoil hat crowd.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a regular listener... I just can't fathom why anyone would want to archive it.
Your point leads to the question: Who in the hell would want to buy archives of Car Talk!? Two mechanics who share a goofy sense of humor taking calls about car problems from Audi-driving NPR listeners... What could possibly possess you to want to re-listen to episodes of such a show!?
"Car talk" is two guys discussing auto maintenence and telling old jokes. I'm sure Click & Clack are flattered to hear that you find their voices to be so pretty that you want to hear them in high fidelity, but most of us could be happy with a 56k MP3 stream.
Watch the movie again, because you missed something. What shocks Faramir is not that the ring caused Borimir's death, but that it corrupted Borimir. The line that convinces him to stay away from the ring is Sam's warning that Borimir attacked Frodo.
Samwise: "He tried to kill him! After swearing an oath to protect him!"
Once he heard that his noble brother had broken his oath over the ring, he realized the extent of its evil, and decided to let the hobbits complete their mission to destroy it, in spite of it being the one thing that could possibly justify him in the eyes of his father.
1984 was written in 1948.
Brave New World was written in 1931.
Heinlein was far from the first to use sci-fi as a cautionary tale about the dangers of modern political trends. (The first popular example I can think of is H.G. Wells, with "The Time Machine" in 1895.)
That was one of my complaints when I saw it in the theater. You will be happy to know that in the extended DVD the trees do wake up at Treebeard's call, just in time to go crush the orcs retreating from Helm's Deep into a sticky paste.
By mining the Appendices for more Aragorn/Arwen romance (and replacing a lot of the "hi, I'm an elf you never meet before with one line and one task - you will never hear from me again" with more lines for Arwen) they made a movie that actually had a reason for typical women to bother watching it beyond gazing dreamily into Orlando Bloom's CGI-enhanced eyes.
Nobody I've spoken to is even the least bit troubled by the skipping of Tom Bombadil's chapters, the compressing of a couple dozen elf jobs into Arwen's character, the burning of the shire becoming a dream sequence, etc. What few nit-picks I thought I had about TTT turned out to be included in the Special Edition after all. Frankly, I think the majority of the changes were slight improvements, and all very faithful to the spirit of the work.
So, is there anybody out there that can name a change or two that they actually considered a major let-down?
Yea, Mortal Kombat 2 was nothing at all like the original novel!
Makes sense. Starship Troopers was a largely forgotten novel as far as most people were concerned until the movie came out and provoked teaming throngs of nerds to loudly complain that they were pissing on a classic work, prompting people to want to see what all the fuss was about. The backlash against the movie probably created more hype than the book ever enjoyed.
Which is all I was ever saying. A massive cluster of X-Boxes to crack into the "top 500" would be a fantastic waste of electricity anyway.
Here's your stats:
Total: 0.
Margin of error: Not enough to worry about.
People who have not read the books tend to see them each once at the theater, and come out saying "a pretty good action flick, but kinda slow at times."
The psycho-fans who are buying little Gollum statues and set pieces off eBay are people who read The Silmarillion twice (but claim to have read it three times.)
Believe whatever you like. What you said was "the same thing," and saying so is completely ignoring the facts.
The modified X-Box is a working stand-alone Linux PC, and clustering a network of them is a matter of software configuration only.
Following your reccomendation, there would still be a crapload of stuff to buy before you could even get started. Power supplies, for example. You can argue that it is worth the extra expense to have something that you can tweak to your specific needs, but don't imply you are getting the same thing for less money, because you're not.
Of course since you clearly know more than me about large scale clusters, you must be right....
Not sure where I said or even implied that. I obviously know more about basic math, though, because I can see that a $79 logic board plus $50 - $100 worth of parts will cost more than $99.
If you are 100% positive that you will neither use all that stuff, nor re-sell the PC before it's obsolete, a pair of horizontal wire clippers can provide a very simple solution to your problem. :)
Meanwhile somebody over at Ars Technica will brag about how he stepped it up to 412.5W, but needed a jet turbine cooling system to prevent it from melting the bezels on his PC case.
Every time a front-page story about the iPod goes up, you get 150 posts about how much the iRiver is a better deal. Every Rio story has just as many posts trashing it in favor of the iPod.
As far as I can tell, a /. story gets you a 2-12 paragraph blurb followed by 300 posts bashing your product, your company, and anybody who buys your stuff. Not a very good way to advertize at all!
(I have, on the other hand, bought stuff I've seen on /. banner ads. My "#include " beer glasses from thinkgeek, for example.)
You think that an exposed motherboard, cpu, and HD, with no memory, no video board, no networking, no case, and no power source is the "same thing" as a hacked X-Box?
Try again.
Still, the rest of it is a fun show. (Plus, there's that comfy ironic feeling you get from watching a TV show based on a book about the dumbing-down of America instead of reading the book itself.)
No... 'Earings are what they 'ave in the 'Ouse of Commons, guv'nor.
One bit of advice that might save you some money: get some contact cleaner (that really spendy stuff you get in hi-fi and electronic repair stores.) It is very likely that a thin layer of crud and/or oxydization has developed at the exact point on the headphone jack where it comes in contact with the plug. you might not even see it easilly if it's only big enough to hold the channel barely far enough to prevent a solid connection.
Brush some of that cleaning solvent on the jack contacts (you may need take it apart to do this, but it's obviously out of warranty anyway or you could have this fixed for free), and while you are at it, clean the plugs that you usually use with it.
9 times out of 10 a good cleaning is all that really needs to be done to repair unreliable headphone jacks, noisy volume control knobs, unresponsive VU meters, etc.
I don't know what that means
A "bitchslap", in the /. moderation sense of the word, is when one or more readers with moderation points dislike something you said or stood for and decided to use all their mod points (you get 5 at a time) to mod down as many of your posts as they can, as a weird sort of vigilante justice.
It never really works, because: 1. If you post reasonable contributions to conversations now and then, you will probably be at or near the old "karma kap", and losing 5 or even 10 points of karma will have little impact on either your bonus mod or how often you are asked to mod & meta-mod. 2. Meta-moderation tends to undo what little damage there is.
Over the years, I've been bitchslapped by people who assumed I was anti-right, anti-left, anti-religion, anti-atheism, anti-Linux, anti-Mac, anti-Windows, and the list goes on, all because I form opinions and express them, and some people can't stand it when somebody arrives at a conclusion different from them. They immediately assume I must be one of those Eeeeevil people on the Other Side of whatever holy struggle they think they are a part of.
Maybe I should create a /. journal page to express where my personal philosophies, so people don't have to make wild guesses on what my biases are.
Bad example. Foam is lots of little bubbles. In other words, it's pockets of gas suspended by surface tension within a film of liquid. The gas is not at liquid density. You get wet when you touch it because you break the bubbles, allowing the gas to escape and the liquid to adhere to your skin.
By the logic of your example, snow is neither solid nor liquid, because you can build structures with it but your ass gets wet when your brother drops a snowball down the back of your snowmobile suit.
Kind of puts a new twist on the old anti-Goldwater commercial, eh?
Any kid growing up in a country where landmines are a problem is probably very likely to listen to the nice soldiers that say "stay away from flowers that look like this... we grow them on mine fields."
The alternative is to further engineer the flowers to look or smell unpleasant, so kids will leave them alone.
Good catch, AC. People like you are the reason I still read at 0.